Reorganizing the newsroom: Advice from Edward Roussel

The changing environment in which news is consumed is beginning to force real changes on the way that news is produced.

As with any established industry, now is the time where traditions can hurt the most, because they can prevent people from re-examining why they became traditions in the first place. If those reasons have changed—and I believe for newsroom and editorial organization they have—then it is time to change the traditions as well.

I recently finished reading the June 2008 AP report, titled A New Model for News, which concludes, in part:

The critical difference in today’s news environment is that technology can undo the tidy packages that news providers produce. News gets split apart into atomic pieces for today’s digital consumption — headlines, 25-word summaries, stand-alone photos, podcasts and video clips — all of which can be easily e-mailed, searched and shared beyond the confines of their original packaging

The report goes on to profile the recent behind-the-scenes changes that have happened at The Telegraph, a UK media company that over the past year has become the third most-visisted national newspaper web site in Britain, with over 17 million unique visitors per month.

New editorial processes and newsroom layout

The telegraph credits their success largely to the changes it has made to the newsroom. The AP report details some of those editorial changes:

Editorially, the Telegraph has a simple-to-manage news strategy: headline first (via any available communication method - SMS, e-mail, phone call), followed by a 150-word brief, and, within an hour, a 450-word multimedia story. Following that, assigned editors decide whether to commission analyses, opinion pieces, additional multimedia, etc.

The Telegraph also physically re-structured their newsroom to go along with the editorial changes. I talked briefly with the digital editor at the Telegraph, Edward Roussel, about the results and about the connection between moving physically and shifting the process.

“The two go hand in glove,” Roussel told me over the phone. “It’s very hard to change the workflow without reorganizing the space.”

“Our newsroom used to be split by distribution, so there was a desk for the telegraph online, the daily telegraph, the weekly telegraph, and so on. Now we’re split by departments, like business or features, which allows us to focus our people on the content they produce rather than the means of distribution.”

What it means for staff

Of course the real question is whether or not it’s working. Tons of page views are wonderful but meaningless if they aren’t producing revenue or allowing the newspaper to hire and pay a full staff and keep the resources that newspapers have traditionally had access to.

As to whether the Telegraph will be able to maintain the level of staff that it has historically, “I think we will and we are,” Roussel told me. “Currently we’ve got a record number of staff. What will change is the type of people we hire, and that may change quite rapidly.”

This is good news and bad news. The good news is that the Telegraph is a working example of a newspaper that’s successfully shifting its editorial strategy and its focus to a content production office as opposed to a paper production office, and is able to bring in the revenues to support the operation.

The bad news is that while they’re likely to stay just as well staffed as they have in the past, Telegraph employees will need to have an almost entirely different skill set than they have in the past:

“We need people with mental dexterity. Take the example of the recent Iranian missile story. We need a reporter who can see that it needs a visual element, pictures, or maybe an online debate, and has the ability to make that happen.”

“It’s about having people that know how to combine media and stick it together into a complete story.”

When a newspaper moves beyond text and images on paper, and starts producing news content for a variety of mediums, it makes sense that their staff need to be versatile and able to contribute in more internet-native ways.

Making changes

Making changes in the newsroom can be hard. Many newspapers have staff on hand that have worked with the existing system for most or all of their careers. Change can be hard, even when it is necessary, and especially when it is disruptive.

For newspapers that want to follow in the footsteps of The Telegraph, Roussel says that “the key thing is to have the right leaders in the right places.”

Finding those people is not easy, and sometimes it can cost you to hire the leaders that you need. But having the right people in place can make it a winning transition instead of a losing struggle.

“Departments need to have lead people that embrace the vision and have the skills to produce killer products that will distinguish you in the marketplace,” Roussel says.

Good luck.